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THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

Page 19

by B. A. Chepaitis


  In the wash of green darkness, a door at the far end of the room opened, and a man entered.

  He wore a lab coat and carried a small calculator in his hand. As he made his way across the room toward Alex, he stopped occasionally to examine monitors, press a finger against an arm, press some buttons on his calculator. When he reached Alex's chair he stopped and stood in front of him.

  "Are you feeling all right?" he asked. "Anything hurt?"

  "Just," Alex said, "my pride." He tossed a nod at the occupants of the other chairs. "Are these men dead?" he asked.

  "I'm not authorized to answer your questions," was the response.

  Alex licked his lips, tasted the salty sweat. "Why haven't you killed me yet?"

  "We have no authorization for any actions yet," the man said.

  "I see." Alex began to wonder if this man was also dead. Maybe everyone here was dead. Maybe he was, too, and just hadn't recognized the fact yet. He could feel all his neurons pulling into his center, trying to escape the signals that washed in the air around him. He'd have to block it somehow. Too much, this living death, the despair of the body forced into a life it couldn't sustain, the despair of the spirit that couldn't escape.

  "Why are you here, talking to me?" he asked, when the man said nothing.

  "I'm to check on your physical status, and tell you that if you need anything, you can press the button under your index finger. Someone will come along to help you."

  "How hospitable of you. Anything else?"

  "Yes. Don't attempt empathic contact. You'll find it painful."

  "Why?"

  "We've got a blocking device on the area. Electric fence."

  So much for finding Jaguar. Or for her finding him.

  He looked at the men who sat with him, all in various stages of death withheld. And he knew that here, in this place, he was one of them.

  Terence reported the conversation between Jaguar and Adrian as soon as he received it on his recorder. He thought the Looker would be furious, but surprisingly, he was pleased. "She'll do the job for us," he said. "How convenient."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "Let me think," he said, turning back to his cards. They looked good today. All the aces were up, and he had enough to move around without turning over the rest of the deck yet.

  He played through a full hand, and won the lot. Then he sat and smiled for so long that Terence had just decided to clear his throat, get his attention somehow. But he spoke. "When does the next shuttle go out?"

  "The regular service? I think in a few hours."

  "You are to get on it, and go directly to the center.

  Dzarny's there, and I want you to take charge of him."

  "What'm I supposed to do?"

  "Just keep an eye on him. I believe he's sufficiently blocked from any action, but I'd rather have you on hand. I also believe it would be wiser if you were somewhere far away for the next day or two. I'll meet you there as soon as I wrap up this most untidy case."

  Terence felt his heart take a short jaunt inside his chest. He pressed a hand against it hard and massaged. The Looker had a plan. Safer not to know. Safer to be far away. At least, he hoped it was safer.

  "Is that it?" he asked.

  "Yes. Except in the event that something untoward occurs. Then you're to kill Dzarny."

  "What do you mean, untoward?"

  "It would be difficult to anticipate, ahead of the events, all that might occur. But if I don't return, or if any attempt is made on the part of anyone else to enter the facilities, you're to kill Dzarny. The rest of our people are safe."

  "What're you going to do?"

  "That's my business," he said. "You just take care of your own."

  13

  Clare was ready and waiting when Jaguar arrived.

  "I hope you think the black pantsuit is appropriate," was her only comment. "It's silk, but I find it both comfortable and serviceable."

  Jaguar realized that when she said serviceable, she meant it didn't show bloodstains readily, and when she said comfortable, she meant you could just as easily kick someone's face while wearing it as go dancing in it. The perfect outfit.

  "Let's go," she said.

  They left the House of Mirrors and walked down the path toward the breeding complex. She'd parked nearby the entrance to the public portion of the Sanctuary, and instructed Adrian to stay at the gate between the breeding complex and the Sanctuary. She'd taken a chance and jammed it open if he needed to get in, and gave him Nick's gun to use, just in case.

  As they walked Jaguar became aware of a rustling in the bushes nearby. Clare cast a glance in that direction. She'd heard it, too. Jaguar squeezed her arm, and they walked faster.

  Then she heard a sharp hissing sound, and a man stepped out of the shadows.

  "Hello, Clare," he said politely. "How have you been?"

  Jaguar could feel stillness wash through Clare. She turned toward the man, observed the weapon he pointed at them. It wasn't familiar to her. She imagined she wouldn't want it to be.

  "I don't believe we've been introduced," she said.

  "They call me the Looker," he said, and took a step toward them.

  "How nice for you. With DIE by any chance?"

  He didn't answer. Jaguar turned to Clare, who smiled at her sweetly, apologetically, and moved toward the man called the Looker. "He calls it the Division," she said.

  "I don't blame him," Jaguar said. "Stupid acronym. What were you guys thinking of anyway?"

  He blinked at her. "We never imagined that anyone would turn the acronym into a word."

  There was one question answered. It was not a scare tactic or bad taste, but pure ego.

  "I see," she said. "And, I suppose now you'll kill me."

  "Indeed," the Looker said. "We've been trying to dispose of you for some time, but you're very elusive, or very lucky. Tonight has been most helpful. It will appear as if you were helping Clare escape, and she killed you. A very passable way of cleaning up this untidy little episode."

  "Nice of me, wasn't it? How did you know I'd be doing this?"

  "A colleague had placed a recording implant in your other assignment—Adrian, yes? I met him in the shrubbery on the way over. He's currently incapacitated, I'm afraid to say, and won't be joining us. Your conversation with him was overheard."

  "A tap in Adrian. I always hated taps. But why all the fuss?" She jerked her head toward Clare. "Surely she's not that valuable to you."

  "No. But our research is at a delicate point, and she knows a good deal about it."

  Jaguar frowned and looked closely at his dead eyes. "What research?"

  "Pseudogenics," the Looker replied. He waved his weapon ahead of them. "I'd like it if we walked now. Straight ahead, please."

  They formed a line, with Clare in front, then Jaguar, then the Looker, and began walking toward the breeding complex. Jaguar took a moment to gather her thoughts. Pseudogenics. Using empathic energy to restore kinesis in the dead. Like the lines of dead men in her visions. Now it made sense. Now she knew the truth. Now all she had to do was live to tell about it. As if a thought had just occurred to her, she stopped and turned to the Looker. "But—what about Alex? He knows about DIE. Probably at this point he knows about the pseudogenics."

  "He does. Indeed, you could say his knowledge is personal."

  A line of dead men, and Alex at the end of them. Her silent shout into a mirror of fear: No, No, No.

  "Is Alex—" She couldn't bring herself to say it. There was a hollow darkness growing in the pit of her belly, unexpectedly deep and painful.

  "He's been attended to," the Looker said. "Keep walking please."

  They moved down the path. Clare, Jaguar, and the Looker.

  She had to keep talking. Keep this hollow space in her filled or she would be dead. Last in a line of dead men. Right after Alex. Don't feel it yet, she told herself. Keep talking.

  "Clare—are you amenable to all this?" she asked as they walked.

  Clare
sighed deeply. "I feel a little bad, which is unusual for me, but I think that's because I was looking forward to working with you. Though I'm not sure you'd be a good assassin after all. Too much passion." She wrinkled her nose as if the word was distasteful. "I just do my job."

  "Right," Jaguar said. "So when you kill me, I'll try not to take it personally."

  "Wise of you." The Looker peered into the darkness. "Let's move over here. It's enough in the open that you won't be missed. Though it's a shame to leave your body, I must say. You'd be a valuable asset to our research."

  "But how lovely for me," Jaguar said, "to die right next to my namesakes."

  "That will be nice for you," Clare said.

  "It will remind me not to whimper," Jaguar agreed.

  The silence of the room, the absence of breath in the presence of bodies that retained motion, reminded Alex of nightmares he'd had when he was in the army.

  Somewhere in him he could hear Neri's laughter at this.

  We love dead people. They're so quiet.

  He knew that the presence of death was seeping into him. No. Not death. In his two-year army stint, walking the streets of Manhattan and L.A. at the tag end of the Serials, he'd seen enough death to know the feel of it.

  This wasn't death. This was absolute despair. He'd felt something like this in living people, primarily in children who had survived family abuse of some kind and who felt their lives enclosed by the absence of hope for change, for wellness, for love. A living death.

  It seeped into him. He knew he had to resist it, but he wasn't sure how.

  The man in the lab coat told him empathic contact would be a mistake. He could almost hear Jaguar laughing, and wished she was here to instruct him in the peculiar ways she had of blowing up technology. He hadn't her gift for it.

  He looked around to see if there was anything like a source for the various hummings and buzzing and green light blips in the room.

  There were laser-light pathways cast across the ceiling.

  There, in the corner, what looked like a proton generator, though what they'd do with a proton generator was beyond him. Still, it was something to focus on, and he focused.

  Nothing.

  He gave a grunt of frustration, made a fist, and remembered just in time not to pound it on the arm of his chair, because to do so would bring the man in the lab coat to him.

  He sat and thought some more, keeping himself separate from the constant and profound flow of despair in the room. Somewhere nearby, he could hear music. Bach. A fugue, orderly and dispassionate.

  "Bach," he muttered. "Now I will go mad."

  What would Jaguar do to get rid of this machinery?

  She'd told him once. It was a matter of looking beyond the obstacle and projecting yourself into the place you wanted to be rather than into the thing that stood between you and your goal.

  All right, then.

  Where did he want to be?

  He closed his eyes and let the image of it rise to the surface of his mind.

  Immediately, without any further effort, she was there. Long dark hair streaked with honey and sun. Long limbs and strong body. The smooth amber of her face, carved in the lines and angles of her people, wind-kissed, like the high desert land. Her sea-green eyes, welcoming him, inviting him in.

  "Okay," he said to the image, "here goes nothing."

  He opened himself to her, whispering her name over time and space, letting the empathic space be the only space he occupied. He would show her where he was, who was with him, what he knew if it killed him. He would open himself as fully as he could, and let the demons who waited be damned.

  The image of her moved. Jerked her head up, startled.

  Jaguar, I'm here. I'm—

  Nonbeing filled him. Corpse occupied by soul but dead the scent of nondeath. He was filled with it, filled with it. He felt it choking him, strangling him, hands around his neck like the hands of a man long ago no air no air. Then Jaguar and her body dead her soul in hiding from this outrage dead dead they were all dead falling on her dead but their hands cold clammy in her on her the soft sick scent of it like medicine like surgeon's gloves like urine she couldn't breathe could not breathe, her hands flying out, looking for something to grab like drowning and where's the straw to hang on to not there nothing there except this. A searing pain burned itself across his consciousness, and instead of words, he gave voice to a long, high howl of agony.

  They stopped in front of the cages, which were empty. Hecate and Chaos were out prowling.

  She paused to consider this.

  "Would you like the honors, or shall I?" the Looker asked Clare politely.

  "I think," she said, "I'd like to watch."

  Jaguar steadied herself to make one last try for her life, and as she did so a rushing of voice and image enveloped her, taking her breath away. A cemetery, and a house. A house filled with dead men, like the hollow place inside her. Hot and filled with pain and death and a voice.

  A voice she knew. A voice that was alive. Alive. Painful and alive and marvelous and—

  She blinked at Clare, at the Looker, and her smile was loud and clear.

  "Alex isn't dead," she stated, grinning at them.

  Clare shifted her vision from dreamy to attentive. "What?" she said.

  "He's not dead," she repeated, ready to shout it now. "He's alive. Alive." She howled out laughter, threw her arms wide, let her head fall back, and raised her voice to the night.

  "Hecate," she cried. "Hecate. Hecate."

  Stunned by sound, the Looker hesitated, and the great golden cat leaped from the bushes, knocking Clare down and leaving a line of slashes across her face.

  "Hecate," Jaguar called again, but she'd already turned toward her target, crouched low in front of him less than two yards away, tail sweeping the earth and eyes bright with watching.

  "A cat," Jaguar said, "can look at a Looker."

  He stood frozen for a brief second, and then his hand began to shake as the human and feline predator stared at each other, evaluating their chances. He tried to stop the tremors, control his aim, but when he moved his hand, Hecate's jaw's jerked open in a deep growl.

  The Looker fumbled, dropped his weapon, stumbled backward, recovered himself, turned, and ran toward the dark cover of the shrubs.

  Hecate followed.

  Somewhere close by, Jaguar heard a high keening wail of pain, then silence.

  At her feet, she felt the scrabble of movement and saw Clare, on the ground, face bleeding, her hand reaching toward the weapon the Looker had dropped. Jaguar stretched out her leg and placed her well-heeled foot over it.

  "No, Clare," she said.

  Clare's eyes grew wide, and her hand retreated from the weapon.

  "I always promised myself I wouldn't whimper either," she said quietly.

  Jaguar shook her head. "You don't understand, do you? You said my job was like yours, but it's not. I'm not supposed to kill you. I'm supposed to help you."

  She kicked the weapon away from them both and knelt down on the ground beside Clare, taking her face in both her hands. "This is the Planetoids," she said. "This is what we do here. Face your fear and learn to live with it. Beyond it. In spite of it."

  Clare's bloodied face showed eyes wide and absorbent as the sky. "There's nothing I'm afraid of."

  "Yes there is," Jaguar said. "You're afraid to feel."

  "No," Clare said. "I'm not. I only know it interferes with my work."

  "No," Jaguar snapped. "You're afraid to feel anything, because then you'll have to feel everything. Everything, Clare. The last tingling terror of everyone you ever killed. Your father's loathing of you. Your mother's loathing of your father. The way they betrayed you. Raped you. That old feeling of your body, not yours. Owned and used by someone else as if you were no more than a corpse. The feeling of being a corpse under your father's hands. Knowing you could do nothing to stop it. Nothing."

  Jaguar pressed her face closer to Clare's. "Do you remember that
? That feeling of nothingness in your skin, and the deadness of it. He would come into your room and you'd just lie there, and he'd move you around, doing things to you, and they hurt. Do you remember what it felt like, Clare?"

  "Is this true?" Clare whispered. "Is it? I can't feel it." She stretched out a hand, as if groping for something she could touch and feel and hold.

  "You don't even know what it means to feel, do you? It's frozen down so deep you can't get at it anymore."

  "How—how do you know? How do you know what it's like?"

  And as Clare asked the question Jaguar knew, without any doubt, what she had to do to answer it. Going into her, trying to dig out the last glacial bits of who she really was wouldn't work. She could only give her what feeling she had, with no holding back.

  Where is your darkness, Jaguar?

  Let it shine. Let it shine.

  She opened herself fully, a wave of light—faster than light—open to her. The charged air of the empath enveloped them, leaving them momentarily silent and motionless. She let it ride all the way, washing over both of them, letting the reflection of her own life be the mirror Clare could look into and see, at last, herself.

  Here. This is how I know. This is what happened to me.

  She was the mirror now. Her life, in this place she'd never shown anyone before. This piece of herself that she hugged back as if it was her life, though it was not who she was. She gave it to Clare. Let her darkness shine.

  Clare. This is how I know. Remember? Remember? Like this.

  The moment passed into them, and Clare clutched at her head. "Stop," she said. "I don't want to know this."

  Too late. Here it is. All mine. All yours.

  Clare groaned and curled in on herself, feeling it all. Feeling, at last, returned to her, painful and marvelous and alive.

  Jaguar let the memory recede, slowly, allowing the tide to pull back to sea. Letting the wind breathe it away. Then, softly, under her breath, she began to sing, a night chant of her people, asking the darkness to pass into light, and the light into darkness, just the way it always had. Just the way it was supposed to. She pulled Clare's head onto her lap and stroked it, singing the heartbeat of the universe back into the horror of this night.

 

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